Stephen Hume: Vaccines save lives but many snub them through bad information

Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun columnist04.10.2014

Annual measles deaths, which were at just more than 2.6 million annually in 1980, plummeted to 122,000 by 2012 thanks to vaccines. In some places, a case of measles — in Canada and the U.S., for example — became a rarity.

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Great, measles is back, an unpleasant gift to the undeserving from the careless, the ignorant and the obtuse, those who obstruct and undermine one of humanity’s most powerful and effective public health tools: vaccination.

Aggressive vaccination campaigns began when measles was still killing millions of kids every year. They drove the virus to the brink of eradication in parts of the developed world.

This was a remarkable accomplishment. It’s estimated since British Columbia took its present shape in 1866, the virus has killed close to 200 million people worldwide.

Public health practitioners developed a safe, relatively cheap vaccine and sought to immunize 95 per cent of the world’s children, particularly in the developing world where people are most susceptible.

It worked. A billion kids were vaccinated. Annual measles deaths, which were at just more than 2.6 million annually in 1980, plummeted to 122,000 by 2012. In some places, a case of measles — in Canada and the U.S., for example — became a rarity.

Globally, it’s estimated this simple public health measure has saved the lives of 13.8 million people, most of them children. Burn that number into your brain: getting vaccinated for measles saved 13.8 million lives.

Then we found the Internet, with its evil genius for disseminating nonsense spouted by every self-aggrandizing conspiracy nut with access to a keyboard.

Suddenly we have apparently rational people convinced that vaccinating their kids is dangerous; that it’s a scheme by big Pharma to sell unnecessary products; that it causes autism; that it poisons the body with toxins; that it degrades immune systems and makes the vaccinated more, not less, susceptible to disease; that it actually causes the diseases the vaccines prevent.

These notions have been thoroughly, exhaustively, convincingly debunked.

All one needs to do is look objectively at the graphs for smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio and take note of the precipitous declines in once-common — and lethal — communicable diseases that follow vaccination programs.

Nevertheless, people who should know how to apply basic reasoning skills are still buying into weird conspiracy theories about public health initiatives that have clearly demonstrated their ability to prevent measles deaths and the lifelong complications including encephalitis, cognitive impairment, blindness and deafness that can afflict survivors.

So now, we now have measles outbreaks from one end of the country to the other as this most contagious and deadly of so-called childhood illnesses jumps from unvaccinated reservoirs of infection to vulnerable hosts.

Canada’s most recent outbreak started here in B.C. in an area where vaccination resistance is high and vaccination rates are toublingly low. It’s thought the disease was imported back to Canada from Europe, where one of the unvaccinated was exposed.

Now there are cases in Alberta, where schools were closed in an attempt to curb its spread and the cost of attempting to contain the outbreak already exceeds $1.4 million. The virus now appears in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and, most recently, Ontario, where public health officials were sufficiently alarmed to send unvaccinated students home from school. Who doubts that Quebec, Atlantic Canada and the North can expect it soon?

This will be of concern in the North. During one measles epidemic in 1948, the mortality rate reached 26.6 per cent.

In B.C.’s outbreak, one representive for the unvaccinated advanced the theological proposition that having one’s children immunized would be interfering with God’s purpose. Indeed? And driving a car with airbags installed interferes with God’s purpose? How about washing your hands with soap and water?

I don’t think so. God helps those who help themselves — by using the brains and common sense provided for that purpose.

However, there’s no disputing that a segment of the population now resists science, embraces superstition and thus puts the rest of us at risk. While the measles vaccine has proven a wonder weapon, about 15 per cent of babies and 10 per cent of toddlers still don’t develop immunity despite vaccination. They are the ones who remain most at risk from those who decline vaccination.

What are we to take from this?

Even in the midst of the stunning success of vaccination on the global scale, this persistent dance of denial represents a public health failure of some significance, particularly here in one of the best educated societies in the history of civilization.

If this kind of resistance to medical knowledge and practice occurs in spite of the availability of information, we then must try to discover why the denial is so pervasive and pigheaded and then redouble efforts to overcome it, something at which we’ve evidently failed.

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Stephen Hume: Vaccines save lives but many snub them through bad information

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